The Dilemma : You’re at a football game and there ’s a large , cigar - shaped object bulk large suspiciously closemouthed to you . inquiry : Is it a sausage or a zeppelin ? And more important , why did n’t you get better seats ?
People you could yarn-dye : whoever ’s perched next to you in the nosebleed .
The Quick Trick : When in doubt , just retrieve of Led Zeppelin . Graf Zeppelin are dense metal — or at least they ’ve contract metal frame . Blimps , on the other hand , are n’t .
The Explanation : Both sausage and zeppelins work by being light than breeze — they’re filled with a gas that ’s light than oxygen , so they go up like hot - gentle wind balloon . But balloon ca n’t be steered . Realizing this , German Count ( Graf ) Ferdinand von Zeppelin make up one’s mind he wanted to devise a " dirigible [ or steerable ] balloon" in the 1890s for utilisation in military reconnaissance mission work . finally , these steerable balloons took the generic name zeppelin and were used as submarine sandwich or scout foxiness through World War I. This was just one of their many uses , however . The airships double as a major fashion of transportation between the wars , routinely making transatlantic flight , and the enormousGraf Zeppelineven circumnavigate the globe in 1929 .
So just how popular were these zeppelins ? Well , enough that the spire on the top of the Empire State Building was design as a dockage mast for them , although that idea prove impractical due to the serious updrafts ( and besides , who wants to debark while dangling 1,300 foot over Manhattan ? ) .
Incidentally , anyone who ’s seen the footage of theHindenburg incineratingat Lakehurst , N.J. , in 1937 can see evidence of the main divergence between zeppelins and sausage balloon : zeppelins have unbending metallic element skeletons , making them desirable for farsighted trip in a wider variety of weather conditions ( which also get them expensive ) . sausage , on the other hand , are simply shaped balloon with fins and an engine . Oh , and as for the name " blimp" ? It dates back to 1916 and mime the sound made when the balloon is thumped with a finger .
go and Other ZeppelinsLed Zeppelin is to date the slap-up band ever named after a flying machine ( take that , Jefferson Airplane ) . The band ’s name is completely attributable to Keith Moon , the later and gonzo drummer of The Who . The pessimistic Moon thought the band , originally shout out the New Yardbirds , would " go over like a lead Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin . “ But the plucky untried band reveled in the challenge and quickly adopted the name — with a minor modification in spelling .
Excerpted fromWhat ’s the Difference ?
